Hilary Fannin: Sorry, Michelle Obama, group wholesomeness isn’t for me

Barack Obama’s legacy will doubtless be the subject of many column inches and much debate when he closes the White House door behind him after the 2016 American presidential election. He will remain long in our nation’s soggy collective mind, not least because of his jubilant trip to the hitherto little-known town (well, I’d certainly never heard of it) of Moneygall in Co Offaly, now home to Barack Obama Plaza, where you can enjoy a very nice hamburger and a takeaway coffee, and fill up your car with glistening petroleum. Who’d have guessed it back in the day, eh? Who’d have envisaged a gleaming forecourt and a double whopper inspired by the 44th president of the United States.

Equally unforeseeable way back then, when first ladies were better known for their steely backcombs and determined lack of spontaneity, was Michelle Obama on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, stepping it out on the studio dancefloor with the TV host to a groovy little number called Uptown Funk.

I have a friend who was in the delegation that welcomed the Obamas to Dublin during their visit in May 2011. Her abiding memory of meeting the couple is of Michelle, of her warmth, her energy, her infectious enthusiasm.

Call me old-fashioned, but it makes me feel vaguely better about this fiftysomething life, watching a gay comedian and a black first lady busting some dance moves on network TV. Like anyone thought that was ever going to happen when we were down on our tender knees in front of the kitchen wall, whispering our devotion to the JFK portrait, so gracefully illuminated by the pulse of the sacred heart lamp.

High fives all round

Michelle Obama was on the show to publicise the latest challenge in her ongoing health initiative, designed to get Americans off their backsides and on to their allotments, or some such laudable thing. The campaign, called Gimme Five, encourages people to develop five new healthy living habits, which is a palatable, if somewhat tedious, aspiration. The Gimme Five plan, however, also suggests that Americans dole out high fives when they observe their friends, neighbours and hitherto comatose family members doing something physically virtuous, such as walking up the stairs instead of using the lift or peeling a banana instead of unwrapping a Twinkie.

I think Gimme Five is a dreadful title and an even worse concept. If someone high-fived me when I was mooching along the seafront in my baggy-arsed combinations trying to get a bit of headspace, I’d leg it straight to the chipper and buy myself a battered sausage.

If I’d wanted communal approval (or shared disdain), I’d have joined a synchronised- swimming class. Why does everything have to be so collective, so damn reciprocal?

I understand the point of sugar tax. I understand neutral tobacco packaging. I even understand the proposed ban on selling cheap alcohol, even if it means a tenner for an E or a bomb of MDMA could, to our cash-strapped youth, look like a more economical way of getting out of their tiny minds. But group wholesomeness?

Years ago, when women were called ladies, and they sat in the passenger seat in their girdles and pearls, my mother joined a slimming club. At the first meeting in the parish hall, the awfully nice and enviably firm leader suggested that all the ladies get up and out of their stackable plastic chairs and run around the room in a circle to get the blood flowing, thus encouraging weight loss.

Prancing around in that decorous, modest circle, my mother began to neigh, then whinny, like a little pony; like a bold, stubborn and recalcitrant little horse, she just couldn’t manage the collective experience. She had to turn it into a one-ring circus.

Some people just aren’t very good in groups, they just don’t like to be told what to do. (“Mr Behan, do you know that three consecutive days without alcohol simply does wonders for your liver? And you, Mr Beckett, I’m sure you’ve been told this before, but nobody, and I mean nobody, wants to kiss a used ashtray.”)

Still, if anyone is going to come close to persuading the reluctant joiners among us to shake the dust off our yoga pants, break out the juicer, scrub the muck off the beetroot and devote our leisure time to group trampolining while juggling filigrees of edible seaweed, Michelle Obama might just tip the scales.